Thursday, December 29, 2016

It’s a common
complaint that trailers nowadays give away too much. I haven’t seen America’s Sweethearts, but on the basis
of the trailer, I feel like I have. Of course, depending on how you look at it,
this might mean that the trailer functions just perfectly, allowing the viewer
to save the ten bucks without even minor regret. I was also sure that the Planet of the Apes trailer had given me
all I needed, but since the film’s directed by Tim Burton I went anyway. The
film was just as dull as the trailer – and, of course, about sixty times as
long. Probably the main advantage of seeing Planet
of the Apes was that the five or six trailers preceding it gave me lots of
additional insights into movies I can avoid over the coming while. Of course,
the trailers are all on the Internet nowadays anyway, so there probably wasn’t
even that much real advantage.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

If it’s the job of a
trailer to make the film look as good as possible without yielding up all its
secrets, then the one for Hedwig and the
Angry Inch must be the recent best. On the basis of those three minutes,
the film is a Rocky Horror Picture Show-like
cornucopia of outrageous gender-bending tableaux, including lyrics up on the
screen for audience participation, cartoon inserts, and general
unpredictability all over the place. It looks like a matter of taste, sure, but
you imagine the film’s going to be consistently wacky and diverting. Well, I
now know that the trailer was concocted only by meticulously pruning the film’s
most eccentric and colourful moments. The rest is oddly dour, even depressing.

The film is written
and directed by John Cameron Mitchell, who also stars in it (quite
impressively). Hedwig is born a boy behind the Berlin Wall, but undergoes
transgender surgery to marry an American GI. That gets her to freedom in the
States, but the GI soon walks out on him, and then the Wall comes down anyway.
Hedwig now tours through a series of dismal concert venues with her
inexplicably faithful band, capitalizing on her sexually ambiguous persona.
Much of the film consists of musical performance (the songs generally aren’t at
all bad, both on their own terms and as knowing parody of the glamrock idiom);
in between, Hedwig bemoans its past and present problems.

Hedwig’s surgery was
botched (as one of the songs puts it, “Six inches forward and five inches back;
I’ve got an angry inch”) and the character occasionally marshals this trauma as
performance art. At other times, Hedwig’s seemingly on the edge of a breakdown.
The film constructs a surprisingly comprehensive study of the character, and
there’s something grandly imaginative about the notion of sexual confusion
served up as a legacy for political transgression. It’s a rather hermetic
metaphor though, and the film never manages to override an air of “So what?”
Through sheer force of will I guess, Rocky
Horror still manages to make a lot of people buy into its worldview – if
only for 90 midnight minutes every now and then. Hedwig is just too reticent:
ultimately, it seems like little more than another sob story. Except for those
few scattered moments (about a trailer’s worth) of eccentricity.

Ghost World

I haven’t seen the
trailer for Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World,
but I feel confident in asserting that it couldn’t possibly have succeeded in
giving away the whole movie. This is about two young women – apparently
congenitally ironic and apathetic and distanced from most of their peers – in
the weeks after high-school graduation, hanging out around their boring
neighborhood and wondering vaguely what to do. One eventually goes to work in a
Starbucks clone and gradually seems to be inching toward normality. The other
holds on longer, but she’s clearly under siege. She’s played by Thora Birch,
who’s just about perfect – as opaque as a truly alienated teenager should be,
but no more than that.

The movie has lots
of funny lines, generally rooted in sarcasm or in the sheer consistency of
Birch’s resistance to much of what surrounds her. But the film’s real strength
is in how it defines and maintains a rather unique mood of creeping dread –
rooted in Birch’s pervasive antipathy, her secret nervousness about the course
she’s on, and her reluctance to change. During the course of the film she tries
out a vast array of clothing, from a tacky dinosaur T-shirt to the almost
elegant (her friend at one point refers to her former “old lady period”). She’s
trying identities on for size, but not realizing how her experimentation has to
go deeper (her helmet-like black hair and heavy-framed glasses seem like a
perpetual armor). In one scene she rants against “extroverted” types; in the
next scene, she’s enjoying a radio DJ (extroverted, of course) that her
companion yells at for being unbearably shrill. In school you can maintain
arbitrary self-definitions because it’s sheltered and your little subgroup’s in
it together; step out into more open territory and things quickly start to
break down.

Psychic territory

Birch meets a dorky
middle-aged old-record enthusiast (played by Steve Buscemi, in a performance
that should conclusively dispel his ratbag image) who grows on her. He
impresses her by virtue of his difference, even if the way in which he’s
different doesn’t have much in common with the way in which she is. Their relationship is very
sweetly portrayed; neither fully understands whether the territory they share
is superficial or deep, and by the time they think to ask, it’s probably too
late. When they sleep together, it carries absolutely no Lolita-type subtext – itself a sign of how well the film avoids the
norm. Sometimes, as in the scenes involving a pretentious art teacher played by
Ileanna Douglas, Ghost World does
take easier paths, but since those scenes are consistently among the film’s
funniest, it doesn’t seem to matter too much.

The film has a
fanciful ending, in that it manages to avoid compromise and to allow Birch to
retain most of her psychic territory. It’s also the only time that the film
seems to take the supernatural undertones of its title too literally. But that
hardly matters either. Ghost World
lasts 111 minutes, and yields at least 109 minutes of satisfying movie watching
– a ratio directly opposite to the other pictures I mentioned.

Friday, December 23, 2016

In What Dreams May Come, Robin Williams
dies in a car crash and ascends to heaven, while his grieving wife kills
herself and gets sent to hell (mandatory for suicides – them’s the rules).
Williams bravely sets out across the divide, to find her and bring her to join
him in Paradise (rules aside, getting into heaven’s apparently largely a matter
of who you know). As I often like to say, place your bets now on whether he makes
it or not. But I was well-primed to identify with Williams’ quest, because I
recently had to search for my own wife, on a Saturday afternoon in the Eaton
Centre. Oh God, the crush, the airless horror of it all. I was sure I was
condemned. But I found her, and somehow we escaped, maybe not with our souls
intact, but with most of our money.

My lost soul

A facetious response
to a crucial spiritual concept, you say? Perhaps that’s right. I am, quite
certainly, a bit of a spiritual wasteland. I’m happy to admit ignorance of all
the big questions, but also to admit a blithe disregard for them. Whenever I go
to the zoo, I’m struck by the inadequacy of evolution as an explanation for
such strange, weird beauty, but I lack the faith to believe in a single Creator.
So I just amble along, presuming I know nothing.

In much the same
way, I tend to shy away from any talk of “vision” or “soul” or any of that
intangible inspirational stuff. My ideal image of myself, I suppose, would be
as an easygoing pragmatist. I just like to get things done, in my own way, with
the minimum bother to myself or to others. I’m amiable, I think, but not at all
touchy-feely – actually I don’t much like to touch anyone at all except my wife
(who must apparently have been on good form this week to deserve all these
mentions), and I’d rather reserve all sentiment for the same recipient. As you
can see, I don’t mind talking about myself to some extent, but the more
superficial the better.

I’ve set all this
out as a comprehensive acknowledgement that I’m not the ideal viewer for What Dreams May Come. It’s not that I
couldn’t warm to the setting of heaven and hell, if there were some point to it
– surrealism, or allegory, or whatever. In fact, one of my favourite films,
Jean Cocteau’s Orphee, moves
deliciously between this world and the next. In Orphee, it’s really the weird specificity that’s so compelling –
the juxtaposition of outlandish mythology (mysterious messages received on a
car radio; mirrors that act as portals to hell) with moments of rustic comedy
or mundane potboiler. The spirit world’s emissaries zoom around on motorcycles;
the angel Heurtebise hangs around the house in an open-necked shirt. Orphee consistently evokes the
strangeness of the creative muse in a way that’s still fresh and alluring.

Armageddon

In What Dreams May Come the only point
seems to be size (it’s the Godzilla of sappy couple movies). With all the
kindness I can muster, I can’t see the relationship between Williams (in one of
his distinctly dull modes here) and his wife (played, sort of, by Annabella
Sciorra) as more than a self-important, patently fake Hollywood invention. It’s
all puffed-up talk, ponderous looks and confessions, enacted in one dreary
flashback after another. Despite all the wet dialogue about their rare status
as true boundary-crossing “soulmates,” the film conspicuously fails to evoke
mutual delight, scintillating rapport, or any of the qualities that might send
a man more than, oh, a few blocks in search of a missing spouse. It’s rather grotesque
to elevate the attempted reunification of this mediocre pair to the level of
Most Momentous Love Story in the History of Creation. If it were Bogart
laconically trekking through a maelstrom of evil in search of Bacall, I might
have considered it.

Be warned too that
Williams’ journey, after all the build-up, isn’t actually that onerous. One
might have thought that penetrating Satan’s empire would entail enough
resistance to require, at the very least, the assistance of a Bruce Willis, but
it turns out to be primarily a matter of achieving a state of mind that
transcends all obstacles. This is convenient for the filmmakers, of course,
because if there are no objective rules or limitations on their chosen
universe, they can make any narrative leaps they like, at any point, without
worrying about the normal stumbling blocks of causation and plausibility. The
strange result is that it’s apparently far easier to engineer the meeting of
lovers across heaven and hell than to pull off the same thing in, say, Boston
(the setting of the current Next Stop
Wonderland).

Chicken Soup for the Vegetarian

I should acknowledge
that the film has another selling point – its computer-generated depictions of
the next life. When Williams wakes up in heaven, his surroundings have the
consistency of paint; they threaten to melt away as he touches them. It’s a
beautiful depiction of his fantasies and dreams made real, still fragile in
their newness. The film’s concept of hell is a bit more generic, but still
undoubtedly unappealing (although a film less concerned about the family
audience might have turned up the evidence of pain and suffering a bit, or
might at least have trotted out a few more lawyers and accountants). Some
critics think the movie’s visual qualities compensate for any weaknesses in the
storytelling. My own view on that: if a story’s not worth telling, it’s not
worth telling beautifully.

What Dreams May Come is one of the year’s most pretentious
movies, somewhat laughable in its hunger for grandeur. But as I said, I’m not
the spiritual type. The only one of those inspirational “Chicken Soup” books I
might consider buying would be “Chicken Soup for the Chicken” (in the hope of
bleak cannibalistic irony). Still, despite my distinctly earthbound soul, I’m
lucky enough to know a little bit about love (there’s that woman again) and
this film failed that basic test of recognition. I would have forgiven it all
its missteps in depicting the big celestial canvas, if it were only truer in
capturing the small intimate one.

Thursday, December 15, 2016

77-year-old Rivette
is one of my all-time favourite directors. His films have a choreography and
poise that walk an often-magical line between naturalism and artificiality. He
seems to me a highly uninsistent artist – his films aren’t conventionally
passionate or prescriptive; they reflect the open-mindedness of someone who has
a generously expansive vision of both life and cinema. The new film, once
again, is uniquely his. It commences as a (to be honest, not overly engaging)
study of a relationship, focusing on Julien as he tries to rekindle a past
relationship with the enigmatic Marie. It slowly transforms itself into a
supernatural reverie.

Julien is a repairer
of old clocks, living alone with his cat; he’s also a blackmailer – an
exploiter of secrets – and while I detected a certain fairy-tale-like element
early on, I thought the model might be one of those stories where the princess
ends up imprisoned in the tower. But Rivette starts to invest the movie with
sex scenes that (although mild by contemporary standards) are more vivid than
we’re used to from him, and as they make love, the two create fantastic
narratives, redefining their relationship. Around this time, the film’s logic
becomes gradually more dream-like, with Marie holding the key – at one point,
she admits that she doesn’t know how the (highly arbitrary-seeming) rules
actually work – she only knows what they are. And later there’s a secret sign
that utterly transforms reality.

This is highly
reminiscent of the magic candy that triggers the other world in Celine and Julie Go Boating, and there’s
no doubt that Marie et Julien will be
most rewarding for a Rivette fan. If you’ve accustomed yourself to his
particular kind of enigmatic elegance, you could watch it forever. It’s almost
as if he’s working through the genres in late career – Secret Defense was a thriller, Haut
bas fragile was a musical – and the films all possess an elemental joy at
the explorations he’s undertaken. Like Celine
and Julie, the new film seems like a pure creation of cinema – someone
refers to Marie, in her past, as a “prisoner of the image she cast for others,”
and Rivette’s films, with their labyrinthine implications, always provide the
sense of a creative process that’s invested to an unusual extent in the viewer.
And the film demonstrates his profound affinity for femininity. It has chapter
headings that explicitly identify the shift from the real to the supernatural
with a shifting focus from the man to the woman. Emmanuelle Beart (who starred
in his La belle noisseuse) is the
perfect Rivette heroine – beautiful, not glacial like Catherine Deneuve, but
leaving no doubt that our understanding of her stretches only so far.

This is obviously a
review written by a fan, so I hesitate to say that Histoire de Marie et Julien is the best film I saw at the festival.
I guess I should just say it’s my favourite.

The Event (Thom Fitzgerald)

Fitzgerald burst on
the scene with the acclaimed Hanging
Garden in 1997, since when his reputation has stagnated. This year’s The Wild Dogs, a scrapbook of odds and
ends about a Canadian pornographer in Budapest, received virtually no attention
at all, but it was the first of his films to persuade me he might have staying
power. Reminiscent at various times of Kusturica, Fellini, Egoyan and Loach, it
can be faulted in so many different ways I don’t know where to start. But the
raw elements are fascinating, and the movie ultimately comes to resemble a
troubled, rough-edged sculpture where the personal and the political fuse into
a semi-recognizable dream landscape.

The Event, which has already opened commercially, seems like an equally personal
project, about a man who’s died of AIDS, and the assistant DA who suspects it
was an assisted suicide; her investigation focuses on the blow-out party that
occupied his last evening. The film was reportedly meant to shoot in Toronto,
and then moved to New York after the funding fell through – maybe this accounts
for a cast that bizarrely combines Canadian stalwarts like Don McKellar and
Sarah Polley with Olympia Dukakis (as McKellar and Polley’s mother!) and Parker
Posey. This somehow sums up the film’s oddly dislocated quality. Compared to The Wild Dogs, it’s a fairly
concentrated story, and it runs nearly two hours, yet everything about it seems
to be given short shrift: characters, locations, themes all fail to register,
with much time spent on barely meaningful vignettes and digressions. And sadly,
the film (set in 2001, although it feels like earlier) doesn’t provide much
valuable perspective on AIDS and its consequences either. If The Wild Dogs gave you the sense of a
director running himself ragged, The
Event seems like its exhausted aftermath.

Out of Time (Carl Franklin)

Franklin’s thriller,
with Denzel Washington making another festival appearance, has also already
opened commercially. The program book sells the movie valiantly, referring to
“refreshingly rich characterizations,” “emotional investment from the
audience,” and “phenomenal flair.” Well, it just looked like a serviceable
suspense piece to me. Washington plays a small-town police chief who bends the
rules to help his girlfriend, and then finds himself framed for murder; he
works frantically from within to impede the official investigation, while
tracking the real crooks on the side. For added refreshing richness: the
detective in charge of the investigation is his estranged wife! The movie opens
in lush, languid mode, and then cranks up the pace; Washington’s manipulations
are highly entertaining, but then the film resorts to a hackneyed and
fake-looking struggle on a rapidly collapsing balcony, and after that it goes
through the motions.

I spent much of the
movie musing on Washington’s star image. He’s regarded both as a bona fide sex
symbol and a great actor, but his filmography contains a disproportionate
amount of low-wattage action filler (The
Siege, The Bone Collector, Fallen, Virtuosity, now Out of Time), as though he feared his vaunted coolness left him
with something to prove. And yet, he doesn’t invest the roles with the relish
that might help make the case. Too me, he walks through these movies, seldom
seeming engaged or perturbed; in Out of
Time, even at the height of the crisis, he barely breaks a sweat. But he
seems immune to conventional assessment. The two women he romances in the new
film (Eva Mendes and Sanaa Lathan) are 20 and 17 years his junior respectively,
but no one’s been making the conventional observations about how Hollywood
privileges the older male – it just seems like the natural order, Denzel-wise.
As Out of Time becomes increasingly
abstract and detached from plausibility, as virtually all thrillers do.
Washington’s remove takes on the contours of a philosophical challenge. Albeit
a challenge considerably less bracing than that of the Rivette film.

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

In 1980, the revised
edition of David Thomson’s Biographical
Dictionary of the Cinema had an entry for Henrik Galeen, co-director of the
1914 version of Der Golem, that made a
strange impression on me as a kid and sticks in my mind even now. It starts
out:

As this is written, Galeen must be ninety-one
– if he lives. Apparently in 1933, Galeen left Germany for America, though his
last recorded film Salon
Dora Green has German actors and a German
title. No other information is available.

At the time I was
just getting into movies, and into life in general, and I think it struck me as
remarkable, stuck as I was in my mundane circumstances, that someone could
simply vanish, while yet leaving enough of a footprint to earn a place in the
reference books. In a certain way it seemed to encapsulate the romance of the
movies themselves – ethereal, yet indelible. I certainly imagined, as Thomson
seemed to, that Galeen was still alive, lurking in some benevolent shadow,
frail but still plotting his comeback, no doubt chuckling at the mystery he’d
left behind.

Finding Henrik

The Galeen entry
vanished from the next edition of Thomson’s book. Perhaps the memory of him had
finally become too frail. But when I thought of this again the other day, I
looked him up on the Internet Movie Database. And there I found, rather to my
amazement, the following:

Date of death (details) 30 July 1949 Randolph, Orange County,
Vermont, U.S.A. (cancer)

There’s no more
information (except the tantalizing bit that his spouse for the last two years
of his life was called Comptess Ilse von Schenk), but there’s no reason to
disbelieve it. Other than, that is, simple refusal to accept such a lame
substitute for the myth woven by Thomson. I think it’s the parenthesis around
“cancer” that really kills the magic, like something lifted from a drab medical
report. Which may of course have been the source of the information.

Intrigued by this, I
searched for Galeen on Google and came across Cinefania.com, which gave
Galeen’s year of death as 1940, and provided a link with the intriguing
prospect: “Search his grave.” This supposedly led to a site called
Findagrave.com, which hasn’t worked for me the several times I’ve tried it.
Another site, The Missing Link, gave the 1949 date, as did the German film
institute site and a few others. But who’s to tell that all these apparently
corroborating sites aren’t merely picking data off each other, spinning out the
same piece of misinformation.

That’s about as far
as Google took me, but I almost wish I were fascinated enough to launch my own
investigation, which I like to imagine would spiral off as things do in movies
into an unimaginable web of secrets and skeletons. I’m not quite that intrigued
though, no doubt in part because I’ve never actually seen any of Galeen’s
movies. Of course, it may be that never was much of a mystery, and that
Thomson, writing in the pre-Internet age, simply didn’t have the resources (or
the application) to track down a piece of not-particularly-obscure information.
But if so, it’s easy to see why he didn’t search for as long as he could have:
if the romance fits, who needs the facts?

Other mysteries

Cinema, generally a
prohibitively expensive art form where deal making counts for at least as much
as artistic vision, seems particularly suited to such missing person stories. A
few strokes of bad luck and you might never get up there again. A recent Variety article pointed out “dozens
of…examples over the past 20 years of Sundance award-winning films that never
find distribution and hot new directors who never make another film.” Matty
Rich won a prize in 1991 for his debut Straight
out of Brooklyn, made one more (flop) film, and hasn’t directed another movie.
Leslie Harris won an award in 1993 for Just
Another Girl on the IRT and hasn’t been heard from since. And so on.

It’s not just
directors. Just to take a few random examples from hundreds available. Andy and
Dave Lewis wrote the fine script for Klute
in 1971 and won an Oscar nomination. The Internet Movie Database lists one more
credit for each in the following few years – since then nothing. Kitty Winn won
the best actress prize at Cannes in 1971 for Panic in Needle Park, then appeared in The Exorcist and its first sequel. Since 1978, nothing. In part I
wonder about the economics. The movies pay well, but I don’t see how someone
retires on the back of the Klute
screenplay. Could someone go from Sundance stardom to McDonalds? Absolutely.
But you just plain wonder how they can stand it.

But maybe I’m
letting my taste for the magic of cinema get the better of me there. Warhol’s
“fifteen minutes of fame” dictum is cited often enough that it obviously makes
some sense to most of us. People can win a dream vacation, enjoy the hell out
of it, then go back to their lives without any adverse effort. Why should
making a movie be any different? Sure, some child stars never adjust to
adulthood and to the loss of the spotlight, but it seems that the greater
number just get on with things.

Comptess Ilse

Which might have
made for a happy last decade for Henrik Galeen, out there in Vermont. But there’s
a major problem with any attempt to convince oneself he opened a corner store
or became a mail carrier – namely Comptess Ilse von Schenk. According to the
IMDB he married her in 1948. It doesn’t seem likely that Galeen met someone
with that kind of moniker just hanging out around Randolph, Vermont, although
of course it’s possible. Maybe she was another refugee from fame (or from the
Nazis), who followed the same random currents to New England, one day their
eyes met at the corner store, they each recognized a kindred spirit, and that
was that. Maybe she was a childhood friend, or an old flame from the wild
parties in his film-making heyday. Maybe her real name was something like
Adelaide Frump, and she changed it because she sensed the history books (or
history websites) would demand her husband pair off with someone more exotic.
She must be well over a hundred, if she lives. But no other information is
available.

Sunday, December 4, 2016

Reasons why we love
the Cinematheque Ontario, Number 2,456: the recent Yasujiro Ozu retrospective.
Only a few of Ozu’s films are generally available (only two are on DVD), but
the Cinematheque had around forty, many of them revelations. Some of them are
pure genre pieces, melodramas made under considerable constraints, but even the
simplest has a poise and sophistication that’s startlingly modern (one of the
series’ great revelations is that 1930’s Japan, at least as depicted in those
movies, seems more westernized than the country does now).

William O’Meara

Some of the Ozu
movies were silent, with live piano accompaniment by a man called William
O’Meara. I’ve seen O’Meara at the Cinematheque many times over the years, and
I’ve always been amazed by him. He always generates a wonderfully well-judged
score, always perfectly attuned and synchronized to what’s on screen. I don’t
know how much preparation he does for each film, if any, but you could have
imagined each one was a major undertaking.

He doesn’t overdo it
though. Silent movies aren’t necessarily corny, of course, but at the very
least they use a slightly heightened mode of expression (sometimes much more
than slightly heightened). O’Meara makes his scores a little more melodically
obvious than a contemporary movie would ever allow, and as such echoes the
visual idiom quite perfectly. According to a biography I found on the internet,
he’s an accomplished classical musician who’s performed all over North America,
in Brazil, Poland, Italy and elsewhere, as well as frequently on CBC Radio and
NPR. We’re immensely lucky that he makes himself available to the Cinematheque.

At the same time as
the Ozu season, the Cinematheque had a season of films by Vincente Minnelli. I
love Minnelli’s movies, particularly The
Band Wagon, which I’ve written about here in the past. I couldn’t make it
to the Cinematheque to any of those films, and especially regretted missing the
rare chance to see The Cobweb again –
it’s an intense drama, set in a mental hospital, of which I retain the most
fascinating (now 20 year old) memories.

Anyway, I partly
compensated by watching Singin’ in the
Rain again on TV. It’s a classic film of course, containing the iconic
image of Gene Kelly performing the title song, Donald O’Connor knocking himself
out on “Make ‘em Laugh,” and at least five other knock-out musical numbers.
Unlike popular classics such as Gone with
the Wind and Casablanca, Singin’ in
the Rain (co-directed by Kelly and Stanley Donen) is a bona fide critical
classic as well, placing tenth in the most recent Sight and Sound critics’ poll of the best movies ever made.

I’m Happy Again

In addition to
everything else, it’s one of the most memorable depictions of how sound rocked
Hollywood, going in a few months from a gimmick that no one thought would last
to a revelation that made some careers but killed off many more. In Singin’ in the Rain, this is indelibly
embodied in the character played by Jean Hagen, who looks like Jean Harlow but
sounds more like Fran Drescher. The Debbie Reynolds character, sublimating her
own career, provides Hagen with a more suitable voice, until the truth is
revealed at the end, with an insouciance that my wife, watching the movie with
me, found rather nasty.

Actually, Gene Kelly
seems to me an inherently cold personality all round, with an expression that
too often creeps a little too close to a sneer, and a way with the romantic
bantering that verges on bullying. It’s odd that although Kelly and Fred
Astaire are the two screen legends of dance, they share a distinct frostiness;
Astaire’s way with his female co-stars often just drips disdain. It’s as if
their mastery of the form, over their own feet and more subtly of their comportment
within the frame, imposed a distance that could only be mitigated, never
conquered.

That said, Singin’ in the Rain has amazing joie de
vivre, and there’s something almost eerie about so much iconic exuberance
coming at you in scene after scene. The theme about the transition from silent
to sound, in particular the way they patch over the aesthetic deficiencies of a
doomed film by turning it into a musical, seems somehow to embody the very
essence of the genre. There’s no other kind of film that strikes such a
relationship between the vividly emotional and the wantonly abstract, and
perhaps no musical that exploits that odd displacement with such wicked charm.

Sometimes the songs
in Singin’ in the Rain are part of
the action; sometimes they belong to the “real” world of the film; sometimes,
as in the “Moses Supposes” number, they seem to deconstruct the “real” world,
to eat away at it until it disintegrates into gibberish – but gibberish you can
dance to. It’s a dizzying fantasy of imagining and living out, from Kelly’s
monologue at the start where he lies about his “dignified” past history while
we see the much less rarified truth on the screen, to the end where a star’s
voice turns out to belong to someone else.

Off to see the wizard

A few days after
that, with my appetite for classic musicals now whetted again, I watched The Wizard of Oz (it played at 1 am on
Bravo, which seems in some way like a sign of a pretty cool station). Unlike
Donen and Kelly’s film, this doesn’t actually seem very well-directed to me.
Much of the action is staged any old way and it has a herky-jerky quality
throughout. But you can certainly see why the movie’s sometimes interpreted as
a big acid trip – the intensity of Dorothy’s reimagining of normal life seems
way beyond mere childish dreams.

Still, it’s one of
the happiest of movie accidents. Everything about it – Judy Garland’s odd
girl-woman performance (it struck me at several points that Dorothy could be
read as being a bit stunted), the peculiarly elemental nature of her friends’
deficiencies, the vividness of its mythology (the yellow brick road, the ruby
slippers) – somehow coheres. Although by now it’s impossible to know what one
reacts to in the film itself and what you’re absorbing from the popular
culture.

The title of this
article, of course, is a gimmick – there’s no reason why Ozu and The Wizard of Oz would be in the same
article. Except that I did indeed see both in the same week. I watch such a
mixed bag of movies that I end up with these wacky juxtapositions all the time
(in the last few days, as I write, I watched Exorcist II: The Heretic, Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Maya Deren’s Meshes
of the Afternoon). But no matter how often, it always strikes me as a small
miracle.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).